A deploy log says the job ran at 18:00 UTC, and you need to know whether that was before or after standup in California. Most of the year the answer is 11 a.m., because Los Angeles runs seven hours behind UTC during daylight saving. From early November to early March it becomes 10 a.m., since Pacific Standard Time sits at UTC−8. UTC itself never moves — the entire shift comes from the Pacific side. The live clocks above show both zones this second, the converter resolves any time on any date, and the chart lays out all 24 hours at once.
What People Convert UTC to PST For
Incident timelines from UTC server logs
CloudWatch, syslog, and Kubernetes events are stamped in UTC by default. When a pod crashed at 02:14 UTC, the on-call engineer in San Jose was actually paged at 6:14 p.m. the previous evening in winter, 7:14 p.m. in summer. Converting each log line before writing the postmortem keeps the timeline honest, especially when an incident straddles midnight UTC — a date rollover that falls at 4 p.m. PST or 5 p.m. PDT, mid-afternoon on the Pacific side.
Cron jobs and GitHub Actions schedules
GitHub Actions cron expressions run only in UTC — there is no timezone field. A nightly build scheduled for 09:00 UTC fires at 1 a.m. PST but 2 a.m. PDT, so a job tuned to finish before the team arrives drifts an hour twice a year. The chart below lines up every UTC hour against Los Angeles in both offsets, so a schedule that clears the workday in November still clears it in April.
Game server downtime announcements
Studios that host in Europe or run a single global shard publish maintenance in UTC. EVE Online's daily downtime at 11:00 UTC hits Los Angeles at 3 a.m. PST or 4 a.m. PDT — harmless if you are asleep, brutal if you raid at night. A patch window posted as 08:00–12:00 UTC swallows a West Coast midnight-to-4 a.m. session in winter, and shifts one hour later in summer.
Zulu time for pilots and dispatchers
Aviation runs on Zulu, which is UTC by another name. METARs, TAFs, and filed flight plans all carry the Z suffix. A TAF valid from 1800Z takes effect at 10 a.m. PST or 11 a.m. PDT at a California field, and a 0300Z void time on an IFR clearance means 7 p.m. local in winter, 8 p.m. in summer. Student pilots can check every timestamp in a briefing here instead of doing the subtract-eight-or-seven in the margin and hoping they picked the right one.
Weather model runs and forecast discussions
The GFS initializes at 00z, 06z, 12z, and 18z, with output landing roughly four hours later; the ECMWF's main runs are 00z and 12z. A California surfer waiting on the 12z swell update is really waiting for mid-morning Pacific, and an NWS forecast discussion that says "through 06z Tuesday" means 10 p.m. PST or 11 p.m. PDT on Monday night.
Crypto candles and funding windows
Exchange daily candles close at 00:00 UTC, which is 4 p.m. PST or 5 p.m. PDT — the West Coast daily close happens over afternoon coffee, not at midnight. Perpetual-futures funding settles every eight hours at 00:00, 08:00, and 16:00 UTC; in winter that is 4 p.m., midnight, and 8 a.m. in Los Angeles. Alerts set by local time get silently shifted an hour every March and November.
Remote teams that standardize on UTC
Distributed companies publish everything — standups, deploy freezes, on-call handoffs — in UTC so that no office is privileged. A 16:00 UTC all-hands reaches Seattle at 8 a.m. PST but 9 a.m. PDT, and the meeting quietly moves an hour on the second Sunday of March even though the calendar invite never changed. Checking against the actual date beats trusting a rule memorized last quarter.
How the Conversion Works
There is no lookup table behind the converter. The page queries the IANA timezone database that ships with your browser for the exact offset of America/Los_Angeles at the precise instant you pick. UTC is zero by definition, so the calculation is one-sided: the engine determines whether Los Angeles was on PST at UTC−8 or PDT at UTC−7 on that date — past or future — and applies it, handling the skipped and repeated hours on changeover days correctly. Everything runs locally in your browser, and no time or date you enter is transmitted anywhere.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is PST 7 or 8 hours behind UTC?
PST proper — Pacific Standard Time — is always UTC−8. But most people searching for PST mean whatever clock Los Angeles is showing, and from the second Sunday of March to the first Sunday of November that clock is PDT at UTC−7. This page follows America/Los_Angeles rather than the strict abbreviation, so it subtracts 8 hours in winter and 7 in summer automatically.
What is 18:00 UTC in Pacific Time?
18:00 UTC is 10:00 a.m. PST between early November and early March, and 11:00 a.m. PDT the rest of the year. The same one-hour swing applies to any UTC time: subtract 8 hours during standard time, 7 during daylight saving. When the result crosses midnight, the Pacific date is the previous day — 03:00 UTC is 7:00 or 8:00 p.m. the evening before.
When exactly does the UTC to Pacific offset change?
Twice a year, always on the Pacific side. At 2:00 a.m. PST on the second Sunday of March — 10:00 UTC — clocks in Los Angeles jump forward to 3:00 a.m. PDT and the gap shrinks from 8 hours to 7. At 2:00 a.m. PDT on the first Sunday of November — 09:00 UTC — they fall back to 1:00 a.m. PST and the gap returns to 8. In 2026 those dates are March 8 and November 1. UTC itself never adjusts.
Why does the chart show a skipped hour in March and a repeated hour in November?
Because Los Angeles genuinely skips or repeats one. On the March changeover, local times from 2:00 to 2:59 a.m. do not exist — 09:59 UTC is 1:59 a.m. PST and 10:00 UTC is already 3:00 a.m. PDT. On the November changeover, 1:00 to 1:59 a.m. happens twice: 08:30 UTC and 09:30 UTC both display as 1:30 a.m., first as PDT and then as PST.
Is UTC the same as GMT and Zulu time?
For everyday conversion, yes. Zulu is what aviation and the military call UTC, and GMT tracks it to within a fraction of a second. The property they share is that none of them observe daylight saving — a 1200Z departure means the same instant in January as in July. Only the Pacific translation of that instant changes: 4 a.m. PST versus 5 a.m. PDT.
Which places are on Pacific Time?
California and Washington, plus nearly all of Nevada and Oregon — West Wendover and most of Malheur County sit in Mountain Time — and the northern Idaho panhandle. In Canada it covers most of British Columbia, including Vancouver, and in Mexico it covers Tijuana in Baja California, which kept US-style daylight saving when the rest of the country dropped it in 2022. Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, San Diego, and Las Vegas all show the same clock this page converts to.